The end is the beginning
It's been a bit of a bumper month for WoSland, chums. Records have been tumbling left, right and centre – August saw the site break 100,000 page views (by some distance) in a single month for the first time, get over 50,000 unique visitors for the first time, and (not unrelatedly) have a single post notch up over 50,000 hits for the first time.
(And all this despite my idiot web hosts actually taking the site down for over 24 hours at its peak for being too popular. "Unlimited bandwith" my cock.)
Which seems as timely a moment as any to move on.
As many of you will already know, I was planning a new look (and address) for the site anyway, and New WoSland has been running in parallel with this site for a few weeks while I ironed out a load of kinks in the WordPress code and smartened things up.
But it's now as pretty as my limited artistic skills are ever going to make it, so it's time to go live. From tomorrow, the site once known as WoSblog will officially go by the name of Wings Over Sealand and move to its permanent new home at wosland.podgamer.com.
Old WoSland (formerly WoSblog) won't actually be going anywhere – all the old content will stay archived at this address so that external links still work and the SEO rankings won't go to waste. But all future posts (such as the 25,000-word monster that will officially open the new site on September 1st) won't be added here, only at New WoSland. (All old posts have also been copied over to there, along with a secret bonus or two.)
Don't forget to change your RSS feed to the new one, too.
There are several reasons for the switch, none of them very dramatic, but I wanted a more modern look and one that was a bit easier on the eyes than white text out of black background, especially on mobile platforms. More than that, I wanted a theme that looked the same across different PC browsers, which the current one emphatically doesn't. I can view it in three different browsers on the same machine and get three different font sizes, which is a giant pain in the arse when it comes to making it look tidy.
Change always takes a little getting used to, but hopefully you'll quickly come to love the New WoSland style as I have. If not, um, tough luck. In the meantime, why not enjoy (or re-enjoy) 10 of the more obscure highlights from the early days of the last 20 months, and look forward to some exciting things to come? See you tomorrow!
Svelte And Morons
Press Gang is genuinely one of my top 10 TV series of all time, and last year's Sherlock was fantastic, so I've been a little surprised to see Steven Moffat's stewardship of Doctor Who make me appreciate Russell T Davies a bit more.
Dance Dance Space Invaders
I've never seen one of these again, and if we're not careful it might be lost to history forever.
She Saw A Raven, She Shot It
Probably still the best thing I've ever done.
Why Marriage Must Be Banned
Simple common sense.
2010 Festival Of Space Death
A great little freeware game for PC. I'd have covered more of these, but indie coders are surprisingly evil.
The Problem With Lying
I wonder if this is still there?
We're All DOOMED!
Parts 2-5 of this are coming soon, honest.
In Your Electronic Arms
Months later, I got an email from the creator of the video saying "Yes! That's exactly what I was going for!", which was really nice.
Beeper Wobbly Peeper Windy Hero Sampler
I still marvel at the weirdness of the human brain daily.
Math(s) Rock(s)
I never did get an answer for this.
Any chance of a "proper" mobile site. The old site was hard to read on a mobile I admit, but the new site seemed to take ages to load when I tried it today.
No reason it should, it's as fast as the old one for me. May have just been a coincidental server hiccup. However, I'll be looking into a mobile-theme plugin shortly. This site used to have one, but it kept making it appear as a mobile site even on desktop PCs for some people, so I disabled it.
Black background with white text is easier on the eyes than a wall of glaring white burning into my retinas like a headlight in my eyes with little black letters floating in the sea of white.
You might want to turn your brightness down a smidge, Kev.
I can't. I am now only able to communicate through braille interpretations after one attempt at handling that searing light. I hope you feel rotten now. Think of the children. They need an alternative theme with a darker look to preserve their young and delicate eyes.
I've been reading your blog for years now, but all of your links are new to me. Were they subscriber-only before or something?
Nope, none of the features on WoSblog/WoSland have ever been subscriber-only.